Q&A

George Lucas

In this online-only companion to Jim Windolf’s February cover story, “Keys to the Kingdom,” the Star Wars mastermind and Indiana Jones co-creator talks about every stage of his illustrious career, including the long genesis of the new Indy movie.

A tightly winding country road led me through the dry Marin County hills early on a sunny November morning. I made a right turn onto a private road, and pulled up to a guard booth. A young man was seated inside. On the upper sleeve of his uniform shirt was a red patch bearing the words skywalker ranch. He got on the phone to check that his boss, George Lucas, really had a nine a.m. appointment, and then told me to go ahead.

By Caroline Schiff/Getty Images.

I drove past a guesthouse, a private fire station, and a hillside covered in grapevines. Up ahead was the main house, a monstrous version of the ideal American family home circa 1930. This is not Lucas’s residence, but the place where he spends his workdays. His head of public relations, Lynne Hale, was waiting on the steps of the grand front porch. I parked my rented hybrid and followed her through the front door; she led me upstairs and into a large corner room, Lucas’s office. She pointed to a certain chair and told me it was his favorite. I said, “I won’t sit in that one, then,” and we shared a nervous laugh. Then Lucas stepped into the room.

I had interviewed Lucas once before, for the February 2005 Vanity Fair cover story on Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, but that had been by phone. I had been informed, for that one, that he would give me 10 minutes of his time. But once I asked him about “mitichlorians,” which are the physical manifestations of the Force in his elaborate Star Wars universe, we were off to the races, and the interview lasted more than an hour.

Lucas came up with the idea for Indiana Jones in the early 1970s, at around the same time he was hatching his Star Wars saga. To better understand some of the obscure talk that follows, readers should know that each of the four Indiana Jones movies concerns the search for a supernatural object, which Lucas sometimes refers to as the MacGuffin. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the sought-after object is the Ark of the Covenant, which contains the Ten Commandments. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), it’s the Shankara Stones, magical artifacts well known in the East. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), the object is the Holy Grail. There were many others in Lucas’s TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which ran from 1992 to 1996 on ABC and the USA Network. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which is scheduled for a May 22 release, the supernatural object is … well, I’ll let Lucas explain, below.

Lucas is a very soft-spoken billionaire. His speech pattern is a jumble of quick bursts that alternate with long pauses worthy of an absent-minded professor. In his favorite chair, he sat in a slumped posture, Nikes up on the coffee table. Over the years he has complained about how much he dislikes writing scripts, directing movies, and serving as the head of Lucasfilm Ltd.—which are his three main professional activities.

During our conversation, he made sure to point out that Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, something of a flop with critics in 1997, is the highest grossing of all his movies. Later, in fascinating detail, he described the machinations of storytelling in general and of creating Indiana Jones in particular.

His detractors say he’s in it for the money, but after interviewing him twice and watching his movies repeatedly, I’m convinced he’s driven by a huge, restless imagination.

Quotes from this interview appear in my February V.F. cover story, “Keys to the Kingdom.” Most of the rest of our conversation is below.

How did you feel about the reception to Revenge of the Sith? And did you complete the story to your satisfaction?

I’m happy that the whole thing is finished, finally, so that was very satisfying, to have it complete and in one piece. It was a great sense of completion. I was happy with how it turned out—as well as I could have hoped. The reception is always lukewarm for those movies, so that’s not new.
There were a lot of great reviews mixed in.

I notice that people only remember all the good reviews. The only one that got better reviews than that and moved the needle slightly toward good reviews was Empire. That was the least successful of the movies.
In box office?

Yes. The most successful, in terms of worldwide box office, was Phantom Menace. So that’s the number one. [Laughs.]
Kids prefer the prequel trilogy.

People who are over 40 love [Episodes] IV, V, and VI and hate I, II, and III. Younger people like I, II, and III and don’t like IV, V, and VI, or they like I, II, and III better and think IV, V, and VI are kind of boring and slow. And of course the older people say, “Oh, I, II, and III—it’s too jittery, too fast, too complicated, it’s too digital,” or whatever they want to say. But definitely one generation has grabbed hold of one of them, and the other generation has grabbed hold of the next one. One of the key characters that helped us realize what was going on was Jar Jar Binks, because the kids that are under 10 years old, he’s one of their favorite characters. For people over 40, they cannot stand him—it’s a hate thing. You know, they’ve always been for 12-year-olds, and that’s never changed. People don’t want to think of it that way. They want to think those films are for grown-ups. Even though they were 10 years old when they saw it, it’s still very important to them, so, for them, it’s a grown-up movie, as opposed to a kids’ movie. The pre–Jar Jar Binks was 3PO. Everybody hated 3PO. I mean, it was like they couldn’t stand him. It really had to do with his character. They don’t like his character, and they don’t like Jar Jar Binks—but they’re not designed to be likeable characters.
They’re comic relief.

Well, they’re comic relief, and they’re kind of annoying, but they’re designed to be like that.

They try to put the brakes on the action.

Yeah. Lethal Weapon, I know a lot of people who don’t like Joe Pesci in the Lethal Weapon movies—I love Joe Pesci, I think he was a great asset to that movie, but he’s not a very likeable character. People don’t realize that things are done for a lot of different reasons. But, hey, in the end, I’m very happy with it, and that’s what I care about.
I like the change in tone between the two trilogies. The second trilogy is dense.

It’s also about young people. I knew I was in trouble when I started that, when I started with a 10-year-old. If I was working with a studio, that would never happen. But that’s the story, and I’m going to tell the story. A lot of people look at it and say, “Those things are no-brainers. They’re always going to make money,” but at the time it was 50-50 whether it was going to be what it turned out to be, which was successful, or More American Graffiti, which was not successful. You just never know. Making an assumption that a film is going to be a giant hit is a dangerous assumption.

You know, people think, “Indiana Jones … ,” but if it’s screwed up, then it won’t be that big of a hit. But I don’t think it’s going to be screwed up. I think this Indiana Jones film would be a giant hit regardless of whether the first three were there or not. This is a very funny, adventurous, and exciting movie—maybe not as fresh as the first Indiana Jones film was, because then we weren’t competing with action pictures. Maybe once in a while there was a Bond film, but that series languished, so there wasn’t much in that arena. The biggest surprise with Indiana Jones was the fact that here was a fresh, exciting, exuberant action picture that, from my point of view, was reasonably realistic, considering it was in the Saturday-matinee-serial mode. But there wasn’t anything in there that was so outlandish. It was all credible. A slight stretch of the believability quotient, which we held onto very carefully.

But now, since then, people have gone berserk. Now there’s five or six action pictures every year. One gets bigger than the next, more outlandish than the next, then on top of that you throw comic-book heroes into that mix and they can do anything. So it doesn’t have that kind of same spin on it, but it might be interesting for people to see a movie that is reasonably credible, and still has all the action, and is also very funny. It’s a very unique little niche that a lot of people have tried to get into, but very few people have made it. A few people have, but only about 10 percent of the people that tried. We try to keep a sense of immaculate realism in the film, even though it’s predictable.

Indy can get hurt.

It’s one of the few times when the hero gets beat up and he also looked like he got beat up, and he actually continues through the movie looking beat up. He didn’t suddenly the next day come out, “Oh, yeah, my broken neck, my broken nose, that’s all fixed now, nothing like a good night’s sleep.” … One of the reasons we do a lot of stunt work is, somebody did do it and somebody did survive it. That was even harder on this one than before. Because before, we were sort of playing with ourselves, and James Bond had already gone to the moon side, unbelievable. From Russia with Love was the only one that sort of said, “We’re gonna try to make this realistic.” Which is fine.

So we don’t feel we have to compete with the genre at large, either the believable part or the comic-book part. We just had to make a good story and tell it well, and, yes, it’s an action movie, but it’s important for us that there’s a real supernatural mystery going on. Only Indiana Jones films are supernatural mystery movies. They’re always going after some supernatural object. It’s not a pretend object. It’s not something that we made up. It’s something that actually exists, or people believe exists—whether it does or not is in dispute. But for every person who says, “I don’t believe that,” there’s another person who says, “Well, I believe it. I heard about it, and I saw it,” and there’s stories. Even with the lost ark, when we did it, there were always people saying, “People are going to think it’s Noah’s Ark, people don’t know what that is,” but there’s information that comes up around it. It was the same thing with Steven [Spielberg] with Jaws. They said, “Let’s make it a 30-foot shark.” He said, “There is no such thing as a 30-foot shark. They have caught a 21-foot shark. We’ll make it a 24-foot shark.” That’s where the difference is. We try to keep it within the realm of reality, but stretch it just a bit to make it more interesting and have more fun with it. And also, it’s based on some kind of real mythology that exists that people actually believe in. Shankara Stones was a bit of a reach, [laughs] but in Asia it’s not. As many people believe in the Shankara Stones as believe in the Holy Grail. That’s just Western, Eastern audience. But it’s the same thing with the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail has mythical connotations, has been ascribed with several powers, but nothing very specific. So we had a time when we were going to do it and we rejected it, and we thought we better add to it some sort of healing property, to give it something to grab onto—which have been alluded to in the history of the Holy Grail.

That movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, holds up. Is the story responsible for the speed of the action?

Well, you’d be surprised. When you break those movies down, in terms of the relationship between sitting around talking and hard-core action, they’re all about the same. And the hard-core action, there isn’t that much of it, relative to some movies, like Speed. Speed is pretty much action from beginning to end. Some movies are just completely action. Indiana Jones films aren’t.
You have the opening set piece, then a university scene …

Yeah, it’s a very stylized kind of thing. We start the movie with the end of another movie, the end of an adventure, and then he goes back to the school, and we have him in school, and he starts a new adventure. That’s always consistent in all the movies. And usually the beginning teaser is around 15 minutes, give or take 5 minutes, and in that, it goes pretty fast. Then it sits around for a while. You know, it’ll probably sit around for half an hour, with nothing happening. Even in the first Indiana Jones, it takes quite a while to get to the fistfight in the Tibetan bar. And then, after that, you sit around for a long time—it’s mostly a mystery from then on, until the snake sequence. Because there’s a lot of energy, and because it starts off so fast, you’re kind of trying to catch up with it, and then, when it relaxes, you’re sort of saying, “Oh, thank goodness, I can catch up now and figure out what’s going on.” And then we sort of kick in this mystery. There’s always a mystery of something or other. And so that usually takes over, and it’s interspersed with action set pieces as the story demands it.
You need respites in the action, so the audience won’t get tired of it.

Yeah. Indiana Jones aren’t action movies. They’re primarily mysteries with a supernatural object. So it’s kind of like X-Files. X-Files came out of this idea—instead of taking archaeological objects, they took Bigfoot and aliens and psychological mythology instead of the physical—but it amounts to the same thing. It amounts to a belief in the supernatural.
Do you remember where you were when you came up with Indiana Jones?

I was in my office. The first idea that came up was when I was working on American Graffiti. I have a tendency, when I’m working on one thing, to doodle around and work on other things, to avoid what I’m doing. And it came out of that, before I even had a deal to write American Graffiti.And that came out of [Francis Ford] Coppola challenging you?

He just said, “Look, why don’t you, for your next thing, if you’re going to continue in this world of theatrical features, why don’t you try something funny, warm, and fuzzy?” I’d been working on Apocalypse Now, which, when I was working on it, was more of a satire, more like Dr. Strangelove—but we couldn’t get that movie made at that time.
That was with John Milius?

John Milius wrote the first draft, and he was writing on it, and we sort of got the script done, and so about the time I finished THX, I was ready to go on to Apocalypse Now. We started to prepare it … [but] it was kind of a hopeless exercise. So I said, “O.K., well, I’ll do American Graffiti instead,” and so then I was working on American Graffiti, and that’s when I came up with it. Saturday matinee serial—that was the initial thought, was the Saturday matinee serial.
Were you living in San Francisco then?

Yeah, I’ve pretty much lived here all my life.
I mean, were you living in the city then?

No, I was over in San Anselmo. [Thinks about it.] At that point, I lived in Mill Valley, a little place in Mill Valley.
Did you come up with an Indiana Jones treatment or outline?

I had a bunch of things like that. I’d given it to Phil Kaufman. I’d given it to a couple other people, saying, “Here, do this movie, this is great, this’ll be fun,” and people would start and sort of fiddle with it and drop out to do something else. So I couldn’t get anybody interested in it, and it wasn’t until Steven, when I basically told him the story on the beach. I just told him the story and he got it like that. [Snaps his fingers.] He had a lot of enthusiasm.
That was when you were waiting for the grosses of Star Wars to come out?

Well, not quite. He had taken time off from Close Encounters, the editing of it, but Star Wars had been out for a few weeks. I left the day it had opened, and I didn’t call anybody or ask anybody or anything. The first I knew Star Wars was a hit was CBS News, with Walter Cronkite saying, “Oh my God …”
You were in Hawaii?

I was in Hawaii, then Steve came—“Oh, it’s a giant hit. You really ought to call Fox and find out what’s going on.” So we knew.
Is Indiana an independent film, like the last Star Wars movies?

Well, it’s all but independent. But when I did Star Wars, the original idea was one movie. It was going to go from Darth Vader coming in the door killing everybody, to Luke Skywalker realizing that Darth Vader was his father, to them in essence being redeemed. That was the movie. The only problem was, it was 250 pages. And at that point I had $3 million to make it with, so it was like, Yeah, right, that’s not going to happen. So that’s when I said, “Well, maybe I’ll just do the first act,” because it was a three-act thing. And I said, “Well, I’ll just make that the first act, and I’ll put those two on the shelf, but I will get this made, I will get this thing made.” So most of the deal points were really designed for if the film failed—and the chance was 9 out of 10 that it would—that I would be protected in terms of being able to do the sequels that I wanted to do, if nobody else did. So that was how I got those rights and everything. And then the next step was in order to really make the leap of having control over my films, which is really what it’s all about. I put all of the money I had, all the money I made on American Graffiti, all the money I made on Star Wars, and I put it up against doing The Empire Strikes Back. So that was everything I owned—my house, everything was put into Empire Strikes Back. That was about the same time we were gonna do Indiana Jones, and, if I had more money, I would have financed both of them, but I couldn’t possibly do that. I mean, I almost lost everything on Empire, because it went over budget. So I made a very tough deal for that film, which everybody in town turned down, every single studio.
You mean for Raiders?

For Raiders. The toughest deal anybody had ever seen. Finally, Michael Eisner looked not at what he wasn’t getting, but looked at what he was getting. And he was worried primarily about the fact that I said I could get this thing done for $20 million, and he didn’t believe it, because Steve was attached, and I said, “Steve is my friend. I’ve sat down, I’ve talked to him, and we’re going to pull this thing off.” Steve had just come off three giant, huge, mega-disaster movies, 1941, Close Encounters, and Jaws. Both went double over budget, double over schedule. Of course, he was forgiven overJaws, because it was a mega-hit. He was sort of forgiven over Close Encounters, because it was a big hit, but 1941 was not, and, therefore, they don’t forgive anymore. And I had talked with Steven. He was a friend of mine, and I knew that he didn’t want to do that. He was caught in some circumstances beyond his control. And I said, “We’ll just do this very tightly. We’ll do it like television, and these are the rules, and that’s how we’re gonna play,” and he agreed, and so I had complete confidence in him.
Like the Danish Dogma rules, but these were B-movie rules.

Yeah, they were B-movie rules, and Steve worked in television—he knew how to do this. And he just needed to be pulled back and say, “Hey, we’re in the real world here. This is what we’re gonna do.”
He hasn’t gone over budget since 1941.

Well, not really. Mostly he’s never gone over budget. And his budgets and his schedules are very small. Steve and I make our films, at the most, around 70, 75 days, and that’s just what we do. We don’t do 150 days. I never have. I sort of moved up from 30 days to 70 days, and he moved down from over 100 days. All these people now, making movies for 150, 200 days, it’s outrageous. It saps everybody’s creative energy, and it costs way too much money, and a lot of these movies now, it’s costing $300 million, and that’s outrageous. I mean, I’m used to the $100 million tent-pole mega-buster, $115 million, or something like that, the low hundreds. This one [Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull] cost a little bit more than that, but of course it’s got Steve and I and Harrison in it. If you subtract us from the mix, then it’s down to a more reasonable amount of money. This is the first time I’ve ever worked in Hollywood.
So you had to play nice with executives?

No. We don’t talk to them. It’s just the way it’s done. It’s very, very expensive. More crew members. More people. More expenses. More demands. If I had done it the way I did all my other movies, we would have saved money. But Steven wanted to stay home. He didn’t want to travel all around the world. He wanted to be with his kids. Family comes first.
So you didn’t go to Australia, like you did for the last Star Wars films.

Yeah. We shot in Hawaii, and on the East Coast, New Haven, and we shot in New Mexico, and Los Angeles.
Were you there a lot?

I checked in on the set. The great thing about working with Steven is, it’s minimal supervision. We agree on everything, and so, it’s not like I say, “Well, you wanna cover it this way?” There’s nothing to do. We think very much alike. Ron Howard and I do the same thing. It’s not like, “What are you doing?” or anything like that. We’re very simpatico. So that’s easy. I’m producing a whole bunch of other stuff, too. Steve can direct and produce things—I can’t. But I can produce four or five things at once.
Karen Allen is a strong presence in the first movie. There’s something about her, and she and Indy have a history.

They do have a history, and they had a great relationship in the first film, so this is continuing the story of their relationship, which is a lot of fun, and she’s a great character. Again, Steve and I, in the end, are storytellers. We may get accused of being overly emotional, but, you know, we’re of that theory that art is the communication of emotions. That’s what it is. What does art do that something else can’t do? It’s communicate on an emotional level, not on a rational level. So we go for the heart, and try to make it as exciting as possible. Then that blends with what I call circus, which a modern critic would call an amusement-park ride, which is, you know, the gladiators, or horse races, or football teams, or things like that, which are exciting and are emotional.
What do you see as the difference between the Indiana Jones character and Han Solo?

Well, they’re both cynical characters. It’s hard for a writer to write a particular kind of character—especially if you’ve written several of them—and have them be completely different, because they come out of you. And then you put the same actor in the characters, it makes it even harder, because, unless the character is written to compensate for the fact that you’ve got the same actor—which is why I was sort of reluctant to put Harrison in the role in the first place. But it has some similar qualities, which, most distinctively, is cynicism.
This movie is set in 1957, is that right?

Yeah.
Were you tempted to give it that Hitchcock action-movie look? Or did you want to stick with the matinee-serial look?

Well, we’re sticking with having it look pretty much the way the other ones did. Steven decided, and that was out of my control. I mean, I had a lot to say about the 50s. Ultimately, he wanted it to feel like the other movies, and it does. And the scary part of this movie, ultimately, is that it looks like it was shot three years after Last Crusade. The people, the look of it, everything. You’d never know there was 20 years between shooting. And I think people will be amazed. It’s like sitting in a big old comfortable chair you sat in: “Gee, it’s just the same.”
Did you see a lot of B science-fiction movies?

Yeah, I was 10 years old when that was going on. The one that I remember the most was the least science fiction-y, which was Forbidden Planet.… There’s a whole genre of movies just exactly like Republic serials that had a heyday, like 10, 15 years, because this was really before television, so it sort of took the place of what television shows are like today. Television shows are like B movies, but some of them now on cable are like A movies, but generally it’s just stuff. You watch it, and it’s fun, and it’s great, it’s exciting and all that stuff. The idea was, you take that B genre and move it to the next level. Before Saturday Republic serials, there were silent comedies which were basically like that, the entertainment cannon-fodder.… I was happy that I could say, “Well, this has roots. It’s sort of an homage to a particular genre, and it fits and it works and all that stuff.” That’s what really got me started. And it got me very inspired, and after 15 years we finally got it right. Because it’s one of those things like, we didn’t have to do it. Steven knew as well as I did, because by the time we really got down to the end, I’d already done the pent-up-expectation movie, which was Phantom Menace, and I said, “You know, we’re not going to win on this—at all. We live in a new world now. Critics will hate it. The fans will hate it. But it’ll probably do well, and the only reason we can ever do this is to have fun.”
And maybe after five years people will accept it.

Well … the motivation for the whole thing, to go more than three, was to have a good time. We had fun making those movies, they were fun movies, we liked them, and … of course it’s hard to go home again. Things change. But the eerie part of this movie—I call it the Motion Picture, the Movie of Dorian Gray, because nobody changed. Everybody looks exactly as they did, Steven is directing exactly as he did, and everybody had a wonderful time. And I think we got a great movie. I know the critics are going to hate it. They already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea that we’re making another one. They’ve already made up their minds. And all they’re going to do is go to the movie to say they saw it, but they could already write their review today. The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset. “Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this?” They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it. So you just have to stand by for the bricks and the custard pies, because they’re going to come flying your way. You know it’s gonna come. Will this be Titanic? Probably not. Will this do O.K.? I think, yes, it will. So there’s not much to worry about.
Do you remember first meeting Steven Spielberg? And are you more colleagues or friends? Do you talk about personal things, or is it mainly about movies?

We’re friends. We’ve been friends forever. He saw THX—I didn’t really know him then—when we were students. He came over to U.S.C. to get one of the camera guys to shoot this film Amblin’ he was doing, this camera guy who was a friend of mine. I’d heard about him then. To do this real movie on 35-mm. When we did Raiders, we just did it without thinking of if it might destroy our relationship. But we ended up doing it and we ended up working well together. We’re very much alike. We think very much alike. There’s not a lot of arguing. We have the same agenda, creative agenda, which is to make people feel emotions, make people feel like they’ve had an experience, and we complement each other. So in that way it’s been a great adventure for us. And in the beginning we had a relationship where, if we had a disagreement, Steven would say, “This is why I think it should be this way,” and I would say, “Well, O.K., look, it’s your movie, you do it the way you want.” “Wait a minute—you’re the producer. It’s your movie. I’ll do it the way you want.” So out of that, we compromised into something that worked, because nobody wanted to do it just because they had the power to do it.
Will he give a cut to you soon?

He’s editing, he’s editing.
Will you take a pass at it?

Well, I’ll go over it. But all I am is a different point of view. I’ve tried to recut his stuff before, and it’s really hard, because he shoots it exactly the way it’s supposed to be. We joke that he shoots the movie and I shoot around the movie. When I shoot, I shoot all kinds of footage, I’ll shoot everything I can, and then get it in the editing room and make a movie out of it. He makes a movie before he shoots it, so he knows exactly what he’s doing. That’s very hard to do. That really is genius. He can see the movie in his head and he can articulate it and make it happen just the way he sees it, and it turns out perfect. You can be kind of like John Ford, which is, you shoot everything in a wide shot and then cut it together. Yeah, that’s fine, but we don’t live in that world anymore. This world is cinematically more complex. You have to have more angles, more shots, more things to make it move. We’ve graduated quite a bit from the slow, single-camera reality that existed a long time ago. Now people expect things to really move—and to do that and still know where all the pieces are going to be, I haven’t worked with anybody who can do that as well as Steven. It’s amazing to watch him do it. But we’re friends first and collaborators second.

Mmm-hmmm. I saw it quite a while ago. He’s doing what I want to do.
You’ve said you’re going to make experimental movies again.

I’ve been saying it ever since I finished American Graffiti. [Laughs.] But you get to a point where you just want to enjoy the creative process, and we’ve all gotten to a point where we’ve earned that, so now the thing to do is to take advantage of it to make movies to express ourselves, without too much outside interference, and let the chips fall where they may. Those guys have won all their awards, they made all their money, we’ve all done our stuff—there’s nothing left to do except have fun. I’m one of the few who slipped through this entire process making the movies I wanted to make without too much interference. I had a little bit on the first couple, but I bought my way out of that whole thing. Steven has managed because he loved Hollywood. He loves the studios, he loves the system, and he goes along with it, so he doesn’t fight.
He can function within the system.

He functions within the system. He rides the horse. The horse goes where he wants to go, and they go together.